NCsoft "Anticipating" Closed Beta in 2012 [Video]

In a recent earnings call, NCsoft stated that they are planning on having closed beta before the end of the year, but they are anticipating the thought of moving the CBT phase into the start of next year.

ArenaNet employee Martin Kerstein said "people should not be worried about the announcement" - not many in the community seem convinced after hearing the news.

This brings me to an interesting question for you guys. We've been waiting quite a long time for Gw2 to come around, and by next year it'll be 5 years since the announcement was made that it was being produced. There are a lot of people that will say it's a bad thing, that we've been waiting forever for the game to come out and now that NCsoft is anticipating delaying release by potentially a couple of months, does this bother you guys?

Then there are others who will say it's a good thing. In a sense that ArenaNet is taking time to polish off the game and get everything to a good standard. What are your thoughts on this guys? If CBT goes into 2012, will you be frustrated or happy if this happens?

I'll be a little frustrated. I don't think that they should make an announcement that the Beta will be at the end of this year if they aren't completely certain about that. Of course, things do come up, but it's still kind of disheartening for the fans who were really looking forward to the Beta being this year. I kept telling myself that it'd just be a few more months and by the end of this year GW2 would be on track, and that it'd be one step closer to being released. Now that isn't so certain, it seems.

This doesn't really bother me at all. I'll continue to support ArenaNet with their "it's ready when it's ready" approach rather than the "it's ready when we can just about justify charging people money for it" approach, for as long as it takes. In terms of MMORPG development, it's quite incredible for a fairly small company to produce such a ground-breaking game to the quality standard that NCSoft have managed in the space of time that they have. I think the problem is just that they had to announce the game earlier than an MMO would normally be announced to justify the lack of new content in the original game. Guild Wars 2 has been waited for long enough, that a couple of months is nothing. I'd rather wait those couple of months for them to finish everything they want to do, than get given an unpolished product now.

"I think you all need to take a deep breath and calm down. The essence of the earnings call is: Nothing changed from what we have said in the past. We will enter CBT before the end of the year, and depending on the results we get from it, we will decide on Open Beta and Launch.

And we stated multiple times in the past that we have a small team exploring console, but that we are 100% focused on making the best PC game possible. "

Games are way too rushed these days. FFXIV is the worst example they did not fix many issues, some of which that alpha testers were talking about, because they did not want to push the release back. Ship it when its done.

It would make lot more sense to start closed beta after Christmas and new year, so that devs can have proper holidays. It would be bad for devs to come back from holidays and being flooded with bug reports from beta testers.

I read in the guru site and people seem disappointed.
As for me, taking a break from wow and will just put all gaming on the side til this bro releases. Im reading on forums, watching youtube. But keep reading forums and stuff when it's 1 year wait left will just kill me

I think you all need to take a deep breath and calm down. The essence of the earnings call is: Nothing changed from what we have said in the past. We will enter CBT before the end of the year, and depending on the results we get from it, we will decide on Open Beta and Launch.

There's a point where long becomes too long. In this case, I don't think we're there yet, but we're damn close. If it still hasn't launched--or isn't at least close to launch--a year from now, I think that's going to prove to be a big hit for the initial player base. People simply will lose interest after a while.